Categorization to the Rescue in WP
Ok so forget about the Information Architecture and Content Taxonomy that you had studied about while you were developing a site using Documentum or Interwoven. For that matter forget about the tree structure that you were thinking about on your latest Day Communique driven site. This form of taxonomy and information architecture is old and is getting outdated and guess what - > it is absolultey not driven by the author. It is a pre-defined set of rules and structures that was built by some business user or some taxonomy/IA manager {or whatever other title that you have in your organization}. Why would an author {who probably knows what he/she is writing about and knows the target audience} be driven by this beaucratic nonsense?
And yes - I am having a hard time adapting to it too, but WordPress has come to my rescue. While developing this site, I was trying to figure the difference between the concept of “Pages” and “Categories” in this great open source software and was confused about why I should not be able to apply some of my “posts” to a particular “page”.
Some digging into these different concepts resulted in the following understanding
Page - Pages are for content that is less time-dependent than Posts. Therefore a page is considered a “static” part of a website unless of course in the case of WordPress - the home page. In the classic Web Content Management System, a page would be your “information architecture” - and you would associate your components to do some work on them depending on the template.
Category - is basically identifying a piece of content with a particular “set of information”. In the classic Web Content Management System, this would have been only used by components on a particular part of the web page to render the content dynamically using that particular set of data. This is the classical sense of taxonomy in other CMS.
Now what I seem to like about WordPress is that Categorization immediately could be utilized as your “Information Architecture” and leave the “Page” concept to parts of the site that are truly static like “Terms of Agreement”, “Contact Us” etc. For example, after this post has been published you will see my top navigation appear with two items - “Web Content Management Systems” and “Trends & Leaps”. I can add more categories if I wanted to but it is important to leave this at a high level. Yet the greatest benefit that I have as an author is that I am in charge of contributing to where my content should appear.
I am not sure the functions associated with a structural hierarchy will go away as in the case of Information Architecture and Taxonomy but giving more rights to the author is definetly worth the exploration - after all these are people who know what they write about {hopefully} and thus it would make sense for them to decide where their content should appear on a particular website. Some organizations do want to have a predefined set of IA for their website and separate their Content Taxonomies in another partitioning implementation - I am sure they will give me reasons and make me understand - they do pay for it.
Oh did I mention that the conversation/debate on the topic of Information Architecture vs Taxonomy/Content Storage becomes mute and null at this point!